Introduction to ASP.NET MVC – slides and demo project

by ASP.NET AJAX Team | Comments 3
I had a presentation last week at MS DevDays Bulgaria and I thought I’d share it with you.

I was very excited and somewhat nervous - this was my first presentation ever. Nervousness aside, the feeling cannot be compared to anything else – I was glad there are so much people out there who are curious about the topic I’m interested in. It’s a kind of a win-win situation, where the attendees learn something new or see the things from another person’s point of view and the presenter learns even more on the topic from the questions the audience asks.

Back to the topic:

Attached are the few slides. As I emphasized most of the code specifics during the demo, I’ll add some more information hereby:

  • The application demonstrates a small forum site. As a model it uses a simple Linq-to-SQL object. The things I stressed were:
  • The declarative approach of specifying routes in the global.asax file;
  • The locations where views are searched (the
    Views/[ControllerName]
    folder and the
    Views/Shared
    folder)
  • The
    ViewPage
    class and its
    ViewData
    property;
  • The
    Html
    property of the
    ViewPage
    class (an instance of
    HtmlHelper
    ), providing a way to have correct URLs even if the requirement for the URL structure is changed:
    • The
      ActionLink
      method;
    • The
      Form
      method;
  • The
    BindingHelperExtensions
    , which can be very helpful when we have a lot of user input to be passed to an object;
  • The ease of writing tests (that became even easier with the latest release) and the red-green testing method.
P.S. Recently Troy Goode published a very useful ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit you might find interesting.

Cheers,

,
Developer

3 Comments

Lucas Goodwin
What's the story on Telerik's support of ASP.NET MVC? Specifically, are we going to get Telerik controls for it?
Vassil Terziev
What kind of controls would you like to see? Can you add some detail on your tooling needs? It would be nice to get a reality check whether what we think customers need is really what you have in mind:)
Lucas Goodwin
We mostly use DatePicker, ComboBox, Grid, FileUpload, and Tabs in our WebForms apps. Telerik has saved us countless time for these applications. In our MVC apps (We're currently using an MVC framework called ProMesh.NET, but ASP.NET MVC is similar and we'll be moving to it) I've either had to code these directly or use Javascript equivalents. I did manage to highjack the RadUpload HttpModule to do uploads, but the UI controls are all incompatible without Webforms. That, and RadUpload's UI is not one of my favorites. We usually use jQuery for our AJAX so we've not used RadAjax in a very long time. A purely javascript RadGrid with attachable JavaScript events (To attach custom AJAX callbacks, etc) is something I'd really like to see. And ofcourse the ComboBox would be nice as well. Maybe allow for a fallback/default behavior of regular postbacks if needed. What RadControls offers that most everything in the JavaScript scene doesn't, is the pre-built skins and well thought out UI. Obviously MVC targetted controls would be competing directly with JavaScript alternatives (Open Source, Free, and Commercial like ExtJS) so a compelling value-add would be far more important in that marketplace. The main thing we've been working towards is getting rid of the event model on the server and no more Viewstate. I can't express how much I hate ViewState and the WebForms event model.

Comments

  1.    
     
    		 
    		  
       
  3. (optional, emails won't be shown on public pages)
  4. (optional)
Read more articles by ASP.NET AJAX Team - or - read latest articles in Developer Tools
Bloggers Archive Tags